South Cambridgeshire
South Cambridgeshire has 27 MW of clean power (all solar) approved and still not built: enough to supply a year's electricity to 9,800 homes. When the wires are too full to carry the power, Britain pays wind farms to switch off instead. No wind farm here is paid that way — almost all of it goes to wind farms in Scotland. That cost is shared across every bill in Britain, so households here pay for it too: about £92 a year per household, £3.9m across the constituency's 42,956 homes. There is also 26 MW of wind running here on the local network. If that gets switched off, no national record shows it.
here
The waiting list
Every approved, unbuilt project
| Site | Technology | Enough for | Capacity | Approved | Waiting |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Highfield Farm, Royston Road - Solar Farm & Battery Storage | Solar Photovoltaics | 6,500 homes | 18.0 MW | 2023-08 | 3.0 yrs |
| Barton Road, Barton - Solar Farm | Solar Photovoltaics | 1,800 homes | 5.0 MW | 2023-08 | 3.0 yrs |
| Bassingbourn Barracks, Old North Road - Solar PV Arrays | Solar Photovoltaics | 800 homes | 2.3 MW | 2024-07 | 2.0 yrs |
| Dalehead Foods, Linton - Solar PV Panels | Solar Photovoltaics | 300 homes | 0.9 MW | 2023-12 | 2.6 yrs |
| Coldhams Business Park, Norman Way - Solar Panels | Solar Photovoltaics | 200 homes | 0.5 MW | 2024-03 | 2.4 yrs |
| Coton Orchard Garden Centre, Cambridge Road - Solar Panels | Solar Photovoltaics | 100 homes | 0.2 MW | 2023-01 | 3.5 yrs |
Plus 6 more approved within the last two years.
Batteries
| Site | Size | Status | While discharging |
|---|---|---|---|
| River Mel Solar Farm & Battery Storage System | 25 MW | in planning | could supply ≈88,000 homes |
What this page does not show
Smaller wind farms on the local grid are also switched off; national data does not show it, so the £ figure here is a floor, not a zero. Offshore wind is counted nationally, never per seat. The planning database can run a quarter behind reality.
Electricity does not travel from a particular project to particular houses. Everything generated goes into the national grid and everyone draws from that shared pool, so "enough for X homes" is a way of sizing the electricity — not a claim that these homes would be powered by this site. Battery storage is counted separately from generation: it moves power in time rather than making it.
Planning statuses come from the government's planning database (REPD), which records what was decided and when, but not why. Where a project was refused we say so and name the authority; for the reasons, look up the planning reference on that council's own register. How to check any figure on this page →
What has Pippa Heylings said about the grid in Parliament? Search Hansard →